Using the JObjects Search Engine

General Information

The search engine used on this CD-ROM is the QuestAgent Pro version
4.0.9. from JObjects (http://www.jobjects.com/). It uses
a Java applet interface to query a pre-generated index of terms
derived from the full text of all book pages on the CD-ROM. The applet
and index are licensed to O'Reilly and Associates for use with the
Perl CD Bookshelf and may not be copied or
redistributed for other purposes. See the copyright page for more information about
restrictions on the content of this CD.

Requirements

The search engine works with any Java-enabled browser
supporting version Java 1.1.2 or later. It has been tested with
Explorer 4.5 and Netscape 4.1 on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT,
Solaris, Linux, and Macintosh 8.5 operating systems.

Special Characters

This search engine does not support special characters.
To search for special characters, use the
Master Index.

Instructions

Search for a term in one book

Open the search engine's web page on the CD-ROM by clicking on the SEARCH
button at the top of any page in the book. (It will be in a file called
fsearch.htm in a subdirectory of the book called
jobjects). Alternatively, you may use the top-level search page (accessible as the link
Search Entire CD Bookshelf on the main library page), but you must narrow the
search to the book you want by selecting the title from the pop-up
menu on the left side of the interface window.

Select the text box at the top of the search interface window and
type in a term.

Click the Search button.

The text box at the bottom of the interface window will show
all matching results by filename.

Select the text box at the top of the search interface window and
type in a term.

Click the Search button.

The text box at the bottom of the interface window will show
all matching results by filename. To ascertain which book they are
from, move the cursor over each link and observe the full path in the
field above the text box that contains the book's short name
(e.g. "prog" for "Programming Perl").

Click on a link in the text box or revise your search parameters.

Special Characters

To search for special characters in this collection of books, please use the symbols section of the Master Index. The JObjects search engine does not handle special characters.

Multiple terms and Boolean operators in searches

The QuestAgent Pro search engine understands simple "boolean
operations." By default, if you type multiple terms separated by
spaces, they will be treated as arguments to an AND. In other words,
every matching file will have to contain all the terms.

Alternatively, you can insert the word "OR" between each term if
you are interested in files that contain any of the terms.

The word "NOT" can be used before a term to require that it not be
present in the files.

Parentheses can be used to group terms and operators.

Other functionality

Select the popup menu to the right of the text field to select a
maximum number of results to display.

The field selector does not currently contain any items to narrow
searching. Future CD-ROMs may use this feature, however.